Featured Projects Three live Azure workloads I own end-to-end — CI/CD static delivery, AI-backed search on real content, and full-stack Blazor with actual users. 🔧 Episode Atlas Track TV progress at scale with per-user state and cloud-backed data. What it does: Per-user episode lists, “last watched” markers, and curated metadata links — so long-running franchises stay manageable. Tech used: .NET Blazor, Azure Static Web Apps, Azure Functions, Cosmos DB, GitHub auth. Why it’s impressive:…

I'm at the rehabilitation center where Bunny is rehabilitating her broken shoulders and all the TVs in the place shut down, and it's suddenly quiet. Maybe not as silent as Rachel, Nevada, or maybe when a Las Vagas casino lost power (talk about dead silence—it was weird!), but still, it's eerie.

Meta — the same company that declared in 2021 that by now you’d be living in the “metaverse” — sold a few million camera glasses for pervs and, all of a sudden, the next future envisioned by Mark Zuckerberg’s unhinged mind is one where we all walk around wearing camera glasses powered by “artificial intelligence.” Yes, Silicon Valley CEOs believe the best way to curb screen addiction at 20 cm from your face is to strap screens 20 mm from your eyes. Silicon Valley operates like an insular small…

As a long time gamer who has never gotten into PC games, this is super interesting to me! 👾🎮

A post from the north-west corner of London, taking in canal-side pubs, Fullers 'London Pride', a prestigious private school, and more Wetherspoon's that anyone really need to be subjected to.I've sat on the Oxford Tube countless times as it pulls off the A40 at Hillingdon to pick up and set down a handful of passengers.Why do they get off there? I figured I'd hop off and see what I could see.Discovery one: Hillingdon covers a big area and its current GBG listed pub is a heck of a long way from…

While Bunny was otherwise occupied with a nurse I took the opportinity to look around outside. While there, I found this odd staircase off the side of a path: I'm not sure what the purpose of such a structure could be, perhaps a place to sit down? But there were benches along the path. Perhaps stairs to Narnia? Perhaps?

Not-so-fat Bike Winter was a total bust. We barely had any snow down in town. So little that I questioned whether I should bother with a fat bike any more, if winters were going to be like this. But we also have plenty of sand here. I love riding the shoreline of Washoe Lake in the winter so a bike that can traverse sand does have some value. There are some large sandy areas nearby that I've barely explored and a good sand bike could open up new riding options. Since most of my bikepacking is…

I felt many emotions seeing Keir Starmer announce his resignation outside Downing Street on Monday morning. Not one of them was sympathy. For those who've spent the day celebrating the Prime Minister, demanding we respect the human frailties of a hard-done-to public servant, of Starmer's cracking voice as he struggled through the last few lines of his speech, there's a straightforward reply. Where was his respect and sympathy for the protestors ruthlessly designated as terrorists, for the…

Most of the music I write about ranges from well known to iconic. I am not one of these people who takes pleasure in knowing about obscurities that other people don’t. However, I do have one intense fandom for a couple of guys who you are likely not to have heard of, Tim Eriksen and Peter Irvine. I took the family to see them recently in a converted church in Kingston, NY, and the music sounded like it could have come from any time in the last five thousand years, or the next five thousand. My…

I feel like I’ve written about the idea that God does not coerce but instead lures us toward greater justice, beauty, and etc a few times already. So rather than focus on this, or indeed the relational nature of the text [Matthew 10:40-42], I want to point out that process thought insists that every small thing is important. In fact there are no ‘big things’ really – only collections of ‘small things’. Everything is made up of cells, cells are made of atoms, atoms are made of sub-atomic…

Last week, I shared my frustration with not getting a solution to work out for the new project I was working on–a design/build for the True Woman ‘27 Conference that Revive Our Hearts will put on at the end of September 2027. Over the weekend, I had a new idea on how to tackle the problem and was successful in pulling it off. The evolution of a solution As I mentioned last week, one of the logo variations had a “punched out” shape element. I wanted to punch out that shape from a div within the…

Ready for a confession? I didn’t love Balatro, the roguelike poker deck-building game from a couple years back. Don’t get me wrong, the number-go-up part of my brain adored Balatro. But the rest, the foam of consciousness so certain it’s in control of the mammalian beast, the me suspicious of anything hypnotic, found the whole process incredibly off-putting. Which, of course, is why I played it for (oh no) 76.9 hours, about which I cannot tell you a single anecdote. Which, incidentally, is also…

How the most disrespected role in software quietly became everyone's actual jobFor about a decade we ran a quiet campaign to abolish the manual QA. Nobody announced it from the stage at the all-hands, but the intent was unmistakable. Shift left. Automate everything. Build the test pyramid. If a living human had to open the app and click a button to confirm it worked, that was treated as a defect in the process - a smell, evidence that someone upstream had failed to write enough Selenium tests.…

Actually, the best of Ludlow was two posts back, but as I haven't included the brewery tap or Black Country Ales pub, I figured I could squeeze in one more Shropshire blog post.If only as an excuse for a little bit more timber-framed glory...And one of the more unusual places to find Union Berlin stickering...Normally we would have made a beeline for the brewery not long after arriving in town. But Mrs PropUptheBar diligently checked opening times before letting me make a wasted journey after…

Time to curl into a ball and hug my Steam Deck (I initially wrote Machine in a Freudian daze). So, the time has finally come, Valve has now announced the price of the Steam Machine, and as feared, it is expensive. Even at the low end with the 512GB version without a controller it is £879!! Then at the other end, for the 2TB version with a controller it goes up to £1,208!! Oh, but it does come with two additional face plates. Now, is this extreme price point Valve's fault? Technically no. It is…

You can already point an AI agent at your Filament admin panel and have it click around like a human. Take a screenshot, find the button, fill the form, submit, screenshot again to check it worked. With computer-use or a browser MCP, that works today. It’s also slow, brittle, and spends a small fortune in tokens describing pixels to figure out where the “Save” button is.

The latest State of Unreal happened at Unreal Fest and, as I had a feeling would happen, the other shoe of Epic’s grand plan has finally dropped. Unreal Engine is about to change. Significantly. Before I harp about Epic’s changes, I should probably set my stall out. In my opinion, Unreal Engine is the best game engine that I’ve ever used. By far. No question. It’s not without its problems, but in terms of workflow, speed of development, shipping, scalability and stability, it is years ahead of…

Leisure LINC went online as a Tymnet/Telenet-hosted service in September 1986, offering game matchmaking, news, member chat and mail. It was especially known for its chess focus, including an official partnership with the U.S. Chess Federation, but it also supported other classic games such as checkers and backgammon. What helped set it apart from similar services was the dedicated client software, LINCware, which was intended to give users a more graphical experience. It apparently had a lot…

Sam Taylor Wood, Still Life (2001) It’s amazing how long a nation can live with a bad idea. And how that idea ages, sours, rots and attracts all sorts of rodents. Of course I’m talking about Brexit. I was ten years younger when I watched the Newcastle results from a hotel room in Anstruther, where I was taking part in a workshop organised by Mozilla with people from all over the world. I would later spend almost £1.5K to get naturalised in January 2018. I learnt how to deal with…

I just realized I’ve had a link to this post by bulbul sitting around for months, and by gad I’m finally gonna share it! In the history of native Syriac linguistic tradition [1], Išoʕyahḇ Bar Malkōn (d. early 13th century) is the odd man out. It is not that he is unknown or forgotten: his grammatical works are preserved in a not insignificant number of manuscript copies and his name is listed with other grammarians in overviews of Syriac literature compiled by modern scholars, as well as his…

the light never goes out only the colour changes just enough to know it is night there is no shadow to hide in when you slide my dress off one shoulder then the other you hold my gaze as you hold my body warm against yours not leaving any room for shame

This post is a reply to: https://kevquirk.com/no-i-dont-want-you-to-summarise-the-page I read Kev’s post this morning. And, I completely share his opinion on this. I’m fed up with companies forcing AI into every fucking app. At work, we use the full range of big tech packages: Zoom, Slack, Okta and many more. Of course, they all have their Companions, which the Stasi would have loved 😡. The other day, I was joking about something with my manager, and usually, he loves those kind of jokes. But,…

This post is a reply to: https://kevquirk.com/no-i-dont-want-you-to-summarise-the-page I read Kev’s post this morning. And, I completely share his opinion on this. I’m fed up with companies forcing AI into every fucking app. At work, we use the full range of big tech packages: Zoom, Slack, Okta and many more. Of course, they all have their Companions, which the Stasi would have loved 😡. The other day, I was joking about something with my manager, and usually, he loves those kind of jokes. But,…

This comic was originally funded by members of my Patreon, to whom I am endlessly grateful. If you like it and want to see more, why not become a member yourself? The post Greebo Chapter 2: Enter Car Maiden appeared first on Other Strangeness — merritt k.

Solstice day in Iceland, from midnight to midnight.

So as I start writing this piece, I have just finished (remotely) watching Nicholas O'Brien's talk at Narrascope, "I know narrative designers who use branching dialog and they’re all cowards". I'm not going to get into summarizing the exact contents of the talk itself, I think Nicholas can do that in his own words, but here's the summary as given on the conference schedule: Branching narrative is widely used in indies and AAA games, but does it inherently increase player agency? I argue that if…

Esmeralda Whitammer, Sara Wade, Vincent Fortuin, Konstantina Palla, and Theodore Papamarkou write: We are organising a focused workshop on Rethinking the Role of Bayesianism in the Age of Modern AI from October 26 to 30, 2026, bringing together researchers exploring the frontiers of Bayesian machine learning and deep learning. The meeting will take place in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, and will be hosted by the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics. This workshop follows in the footsteps…

Many typists, including me, were sad to learn that Charlene Oesch died recently. Her small business, Baco Ribbons, was my go-to source; I used hundreds if not thousands of her nylon ribbons on Underwood-style spools, as well as several big rolls and some specialty items: she could provide narrow ribbons for adding machines, toy typewriters, and more.Baco was not the last typewriter ribbon manufacturer. You can find some other sources here. But Charlene will certainly be missed.In The Typewriter…

When did summer arrive? The last few months have flown by. Summer is my least favorite time of year, and also the season that feels like it drags on the longest. The excessive heat and humidity keep me mostly indoors, making exercise a lot harder and less enjoyable. We do enjoy visits to the nearby pool with friends, at least. A long expected tripWe are freshly back from a two-week family vacation across Europe. We have been planning this trip for over three years, but we kept pushing it back…

Butterfield Market, NYC Permalink. Tagged chocolate, france and nyc. Reply by email.